By Ronald T. Fox
Angry Hurricane Michael, one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the continental U.S., unleashed a wrath of destruction across the Florida Panhandle, peeling off roofs, leveling houses, uprooting trees, boats and cars, pushing a terrifying surge of sea water that submerged entire neighborhoods, and taking lives. After being downgraded to a tropical storm, it moved on to the Carolinas and beyond to add more destruction to states already ravaged by Hurricane Florence.
A few months earlier, California and other Western states experienced a series of horrific, record-setting wildfires that destroyed forests, homes, businesses, and human lives. Like hurricanes, such devastating wildfires are occurring with increased intensity and frequency. They've become the new normal.
What do these natural disasters have in common? As the overwhelming majority of climate scientists tell us, their growing intensity stems from the warming of our planet caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gasses. In a warming world, hurricanes become stronger and more destructive and droughts become more lasting and severe, providing a storehouse of fuel for wildfires.
Two-thousand-eighteen has been extremely hot, joining 2016 and 2017 as the hottest years on record. Warmer temperatures mean warmer oceans, which intensifies the energy in storms. Warming has also effects the amount of water vapor in the air, which increases precipitation events. Climate-caused rising sea levels amplifies storm surges which lead to floods, the greatest cause of death and destruction.
The inescapable conclusion to draw from the growing incidence of horrific climate events is that carbon emissions, a result of human behavior, is causing our planet to warm. This is the consensus position of scientists who study hurricanes and climate. It has been periodically affirmed by the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Scientists repeatedly warn that catastrophic weather events will surely increase if the world’s nations do not act to reduce carbon emissions.
Climate change poses the greatest security challenge of our age. Thinking people know this. Unfortunately, lawmakers who entrusted with shaping our response to the global warming challenge don’t seem to get it, or if they do, they don't seem to care.
President Trump and the vast majority of his Republican followers are in a state of denial. The catastrophic Hurricanes Katrina, Irene, Sandy, Harvey, Irma Maria, Florence and now Michael, reports of melting ice and sea level rises, and drought-intensified forest fires like Carr fire near Shasta have not awakened the climate-denying culture that dominates our politics. This seems unbelievable. Have we really strayed that far from science and reason? Are the Koch brothers and others in the oil, gas and coal industries, who have worked to foment climate science skepticism, and made it a litmus test for Republican authenticity, really that powerful? It appears so; climate change denial is greater in the U.S. than in any other industrial nation.
An astonishing number of Republicans (you must know some) consider climate change a complete hoax, perpetrated by radical environmentalists and fellow liberal travelers (President Trump blames China). The few deniers that even pause to reflect on causality, invariably offer fact-free explanations. Warmer temperatures are cyclical-- we happen to be in a warm phase, which will ultimately pass; forest fires have intensified because we are not cutting enough trees; it's God's will. The absurdity of explanations reached a peak when Senator Snowball, James Inhofe (R-OK), who chairs the Senate environmental committee, “disproved” climate change by taking a snowball onto the Senate floor and noting that it was cold outside.
We could chalk such talk up as pure idiocy, and leave it at that, except that climate-denying tunnel-vision by sabotaging the necessary political will for action to confront the global warming problem is endangering life on this planet. Instead of addressing the problem, GOP lawmakers have become enablers, not only by their inaction, but more positively through their fossil-fuel addiction, land-use policies, deregulation, and by such actions as boosting the National Flood Insurance Program, which encourages people to live in low-lying areas because they know they will get reimbursed for flood damage, sometimes repeatedly, amounting to many times more than the home was worth.
If there’s anything uplifting about recent devastating climate events, it’s that many of the loudest hoax-pushers have been particularly personally impacted by mega storms and wildfires since many live in areas most vulnerable to catastrophic storm events. The state of Florida, which was pummeled by Hurricane Michael, elected a governor, Rick Scott, who reportedly went so far as to bar the Florida Department of Environmental Protection from even using the term “climate change.” His state must now cope with the latest devastation caused by Michael, which Scott referred to as “the worst storm the Florida Panhandle has ever seen." North Carolina passed a law in 2012 prohibiting the use of climate change in certain state planning; now it’s recovering from Michael’s last gasp.
I take some glee in the fact that blowhard denier Rush Limbaugh, who called climate change “one of the most preposterous hoaxes in the history of the planet,” lives in Palm Beach, Florida. That is also the location of Trump’s beloved Mar-a-Lago resort. Obnoxious denier, Senator Ted Cruz, lives in Houston, fortunately for him in a tall building spared the devastation of Hurricane Harvey. Rich people love to live near vulnerable coastlines. So, maybe there is an elementary justice to all this, though this offers little consolation since it's poor folk who suffer the most.
Absolving human behavior from responsibility, eviscerating environmental regulations, ridiculing climate science, bringing a snowball to the Senate or banning the word “climate change” may play well to the Republican base, but it is clearly not resonating with the massive storms and fires we’re experiencing. Nature is simply not listening. Climate change deniers are criminals; lock em’ up!
I’d like to think that deniers will eventually fade away and a new consensus will emerge around the truth and dangers of global warming. Sadly, I do not hold out much hope for such an outcome, not given our money-driven politics and the determination of fossil fuel interests to do whatever it takes to sow climate change doubt and impede effective environmental action. And, even if there is a major shift in public opinion favoring strong action to reduce carbon emissions, I suspect it may be too late. We have made our bed—aided and abetted by the climate science deniers—and now we must lie in it. This is the ultimate injustice, especially for generations to follow.
George Carlin had it right, it's not the planet that is endangered, it's the human race. Good old earth will still be orbiting the sun when we are under water, burned to a crisp or (a few) living on atolls that once were mountains. But maybe we can look to the market for hope: fossil fuel industries shares are falling, while alternative energy ones are catching hold. If it's all about money, then our salvation as a species may just boil down to how quickly we can come up with viable and profitable sources of clean energy to compete with and eventually replace oil, gas, coal, etc. That will take some doing, of course, given the stubborn commitment to the huge amount of capital invested in the massive infrastructure of the fossil fuel and other greenhouse gas producing industries. Still, a competitive clean energy alternative may eventually prevail. Don't give up hope. However, look what happened in 1962 when the steel giants US Steel and Bethlehem Steel conspired to fix steel prices, but had to reverse course. Why? Not because, as many claimed, of the heavy-handed actions of the Kennedy government. Historically, big steel knew that it had always prevailed when faced with government threats and anti-trust suits. No, they backed down because they were faced with competition from more efficient European factories that had modernized after being destroyed in WWII. They no longer used the old, more costly bessemer process employed by US and Bethlehem. (Note In the US, only Youngstown Sheet and Tube, a smaller steel company which used the more modern production methods, did not follow US and Bethlehem's lead.) Not an exact comparison to be sure, but my hope is that our best minds can devise more profitable technologies offering clean solutions that will force older and dirtier industries to convert or go out of business, sorta like big steel in the early 60's.
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